New York City, October 27, 2013

★★★★ Seagulls were
tiny flecks soaring high in the clear sky, turning from white to
black and back again as their bodies alternately caught and blocked
the sun. Broadway and Amsterdam was a complicated interchange for
light-traffic, different streams of it bouncing downward off high
apartment windows or coming low up the avenue through the leaves.
The cold was no longer painful or wearying. The pumpkins in the
rack outside Fairway had been picked over, but not entirely. The
sun was a roving spotlight: setting aglow the hair of one
pedestrian at a time in an otherwise shaded block, emphasizing a
particular man in a sweatshirt at a particular window table in
McDonald’s, tracing chain-link shadows up on a peeling sycamore
trunk. The toddler sprinted on the smooth plastic planks of the
runway on the playground climber, back and forth, till he fell
harmlessly, skidding on his down-padded belly with an audible
sizzle of static.